A lockdown epiphany made Rachel McLean an indie author star, and she has been growing her Ackroyd Publishing business ever since.
Links of the week March 17 2025 (12)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
24 March 2025
The pandemic had a profound and disruptive effect on many people's lives; for Rachel McLean it entirely changed the course of her career.
The author had been self-publishing since 2017, mostly political and dystopian thrillers with "nice reviews and poor sales" and when 2020 rolled around she still had her day job. McLean says: "I was a freelance technical writer and getting bored with it. I wanted to double down on learning how to really make a success of publishing so I looked at other indie authors, including LJ Ross and JD Kirk, looked at what the overall market was like. And there was a huge appetite for crime. I was already writing suspense so there wasn't too much of a shift. And when I started writing crime I really enjoyed it, but needed to be more focused on what reader expectations were and have a better understanding of the genre."
An indie novel scores a traditional book deal.
Tech entrepreneur-turned-author Thomas R. Weaver went from indie publishing to a six-figure, two-book deal with Del Rey, thanks in large part to the viral success of his debut, Artificial Wisdom. The book follows a journalist who is caught in the center of a murder investigation while chasing the biggest story of his career. Given the setting in the not-so-distant future, readers will see traces of our own moment in the climate-change-ravaged setting, where AI threatens to become all-powerful.
The novel gained massive traction on TikTok. Weaver leveraged this momentum to secure top-tier representation and a major publishing deal, including a forthcoming sequel to Artificial Wisdom, titled Infinite Wisdom, coming out in fall 2026.
London Book Fair 2025 was bursting at the seams, with US publishers splashing serious cash as "solutions- based" non-fiction and escapist fiction soared. Meanwhile, literary agent Rachel Mills' debut novel was an Olympia hit, and many agents reported concerns about the International Rights Centre (IRC).
Atlantic Books MD Drummond Moir described a thirst for solutions from publishers. "We are seeing a particular interest in solutions-based non-fiction... Romanian, Spanish, US pre-empts," he said. "Titles with a practical premise seem to be of more interest to foreign publishers. We're selling more than buying this year. It feels to me really dynamic, lively and a good buzz."
Moir was one of several exhibitors to cite American interest: "The biggest deals we're seeing are from American publishers. Many of them are pre-empts."
Oneworld publisher Juliet Mabey also noted the presence of US editors, saying: "This year's book fair definitely feels busier than last." However, The Bright Agency CEO Vicki Willden-Lebrecht noted that "possible American tariffs on books is a concern".
One of the featured panels at this year's London Book Fair paired David Shelley and James Daunt, two executives that each run powerful companies on both sides of the Atlantic, with Shelley serving as CEO of Hachette Book Group in the U.S. and Hachette UK, and Daunt as CEO of Barnes & Noble and managing director of Waterstones.
Asked to identify bright spots in the book world by event chair Alex Peake-Tomkinson, Daunt said that he was "reasonably optimistic" and that "the core business is very strong." This was partly driven, he said, by a wave of BookTok-inspired youngsters: "The kids are in the stores-we are full of young adults, and that's bringing energy to our stores. And given everything else that is going on, we have real sales momentum."
Shelley too was "pretty cheerful." Again, this was partly due to the benign influence of TikTok, where "books are one of the main areas of discussion, and it's physical books that they are talking about," he said. "There has been a surge of interest from 14-25 [year olds] and books are propelled by that." Shelley added: "When I need to cheer myself up, even as a 48 year old, I find it genuinely exciting to see the enthusiasm for books on TikTok."
Global turmoil permeated the London Book Fair this week, but was mostly muted by the overall enthusiasm of the crowds thronging packed aisles, panels, and staircases at the London Olympia. "I've run a lot of trade shows in a lot of industries. I have never seen a show fill up so fast in my whole life," Adam Ridgway, director of the London Book Fair, told PW. "The thing that caught me out was that by 9:30 Tuesday morning we were full. It really was like someone hit the accelerator, and it just kept going. I've never seen a show take off like that before."
Ridgway has had no shortage of challenges to contend with in his first year as show director, not the least of which is the relatively limited space offered by the Olympia as it continues to undergo renovations, leading to a number of prosaic concerns. Attendees often joined long lines to enter panels that were themselves often shoehorned into too-small rooms, only to ultimately be refused entry. An overly aggressive air conditioning unit in one part of the International Rights Center sent literary agents running back to their hotel rooms to get their coats. More dramatically, a small portion of the roof collapsed onto an empty chair in the same part of the IRC, surprising the surrounding fairgoers.
A new report prepared by GfK Entertainment and NielsenIQ BookData and released Tuesday at the London Book Fair showed that fiction sales are growing in global book markets, while nonfiction continues to struggle in most territories.
According to the analysis of 18 international territories, 16 markets showed significant revenue growth in fiction during 2024, with five countries reporting double-digit increases: India (+30.7%), Mexico (+20.7%), Brazil (+16.4%), Spain (+12.0%), and Portugal (+11.4%).
The report highlights a contrasting picture for nonfiction, where sales grew in only six regions, mostly at lower rates than fiction. Unit sales of children's and young adult titles showed mixed results, but managed gains in nine territories.
"Strong-selling novels and continuously rising prices have partially offset the weaker performance of the nonfiction segment," GfK Entertainment and NielsenIQ BookData noted in their joint report.
The company, launched in 2011, has been acquired by new company Boundless, after writers have been left unpaid for months
Authors have been left unsure whether their books will be published and when they will receive outstanding payments after crowdfunding publisher Unbound went into administration last week.
The unique selling point of the publisher, launched in 2011 by QI researchers John Mitchinson and Justin Pollard, and Crap Towns author Dan Kieran, was that it allowed writers to pitch ideas online directly to readers. If enough people pledged financial support, the author would write the book, with supporters receiving various perks, such as early access to the book or a special edition.
Unbound confirmed last week that the business had been acquired by the newly-formed Boundless Publishing Group. A statement on its website said "Boundless will be moving forward with the majority of the Unbound projects", instructing readers who have made pledges to "check back at the end of March when our new website will be live and you will have access to your account and order status".
If you could improve your productivity by adding one step to your writing routine, would you do it?
Whether you write fiction, nonfiction, or memoir, tracking your word count to measure your daily progress benefits all wordsmiths, because tracking can make you a more efficient writer.
One of the foundational lessons in business school comes from Pearson's Law, first stated by famed statistician Karl Pearson. It says, "That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially."
Although this concept is usually applied to balance sheets and production quotas, it also applies to writers. We can't know what's working or where we can improve if we don't have data to learn from, after all. So if you want to meet a deadline, inspire yourself to write more consistently, or just make it to the end of your draft, word count tracking can help you get there.
Most writers dream of being published by a major traditional publisher and becoming a bestselling author. It can take a while to realize that the number of writers with that kind of luck is vanishingly small. A small traditional publisher could be a possibility. But they may not have space on their list either, even if they love the book.
Self-publishing has gained in respectability in recent years-but doing everything on their own requires many new skills that a writer might not have time to learn. Cover design, interior formatting, distribution, and promotion are just the tip of the iceberg.
That leaves the option of a hybrid press. Hybrid publishing sometimes gets a bad rap because people think it's just another word for vanity publishing. And there are some less-than-stellar companies out there. So it's up to the author to do their research to find a hybrid that works for them.
A multifaceted creator finds community on Kickstarter.
When Charlie Stickney was preparing to graduate Vassar College in upstate New York in the late 1990s, he foresaw two futures. "It was one of those Sliding Doors moments: am I going to go down to New York and work in comic books or am I going to go to L.A. and work in film?" Stickney says. "Then I got a phone call, and I had a job offer in Los Angeles-so that took me down that path for a long time."
For nearly two decades, Stickney wrote, produced, and developed for screens big and small, including an animated adaptation of the Horrible Histories series of British children's books, and the 2012 ragtime documentary, The Entertainers, which he edited and executive produced. But Stickney felt called to come back to a different kind of creating.
"I was reaching a point in the things I was doing in Los Angeles where I didn't feel quite as fulfilled," Stickney says. "I was looking to return to comics," he adds, "which was my first love."
A poem inspired by the writer's experience missing her son after he moved from the UK to Australia has won this year's £5,000 National Poetry CompetitionAnnual poetry prize run by the UK-based Poetry Society established in 1978; accepts entries from all over the world; over 10,000 poems submitted each year.
Fiona Larkin's poem, Absence has a grammar, was picked from nearly 22,000 entries.
"It feels a bit like a lottery win, because the odds are so high," said Larkin. When she got the call with the news, she felt both a "sense of disbelief" and "weirdly buoyant - that floating sense of something happening".
Fiona Larkin's poem uses Finnish grammar to explore her feelings about her son's move from the UK to Brisbane
The author of The CIA Book Club tells BookBrunch about his research, his top facts, and his inspirations
The 'CIA book club', formally known as the 'CIA book programme', was a US psychological warfare operation that ran for more than three decades from the mid-1950s to 1991. Operating out of a tower block on Park Avenue South, Manhattan, it aimed to undermine the Orwellian systems of thought control that operated in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War by infiltrating uncensored books through the Iron Curtain. In all, ten million titles were smuggled into the East using a variety of methods, including aboard yachts that sailed the Baltic, hidden on transcontinental trains or in secret compartments built into trucks. Many books were sent in the luggage of East European travellers who were given free books when they visited certain bookshops or distribution hubs in the West.
The author of the Bologna-set Tom Benjamin mysteries on the privilege of being an outsider, collecting ideas, and his role as 2025 Author Ambassador for BolognaBookPlus
What role does Bologna play in your novels? It seems to be a character in its own right.
The city is the mystery. Its 60km web of porticoes creates intimacy but at the same time its medieval, maze-like structure can make it feel overwhelming. It took me ages to really get my bearings (well, we did arrive twenty years ago - before GPS!). So as my English detective uncovers the mystery at hand, he is also unravelling ‘the mystery' of the city. And because Bologna - unlike Rome, Florence or Venice, which immediately bring to mind an image - was relatively unknown when I began the series, I had to ‘world build' like fantasy or sci-fi authors. This, of course, was very much part of the fun.
It is, as you say, a character in its own right, although not necessarily human. In my first novel A Quiet Death in Italy, I wrote: ‘The city was still, yet felt strangely alive, like a sleeping animal' while in my latest, UNO (my first outside the Daniel Leicester series, and which is about to go on sub) a character has ‘nightmares of being swept beneath Bologna's porticoes like the capillaries of some prowling beast'. As Daniel remarks in #4 Italian Rules: ‘I sometimes have the sense the city's alive, and has claws'.
The author was responding to news that the company used a notorious publicly available database of more than 7.5m books to train artificial intelligence
Richard Osman has said that writers will "have a good go" at taking on Meta after it emerged that the company used a notorious database believed to contain pirated books to train artificial intelligence.
"Copyright law is not complicated at all," the author of The Thursday Murder Club series wrote in a statement on X on Sunday evening. "If you want to use an author's work you need to ask for permission. If you use it without permission you're breaking the law. It's so simple."
Here's what to do when facing false claims of copyright infringement.
The recent suspensions of authors from Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing for "copyright infringement"' provide a powerful lesson on the importance of protecting one's work. During this year's BookLife Indie Author Forum, I took part in a panel discussion devoted to copyright issues. Last year, I also facilitated a roundtable discussion by the Independent Book Publishers Association, during which we talked about the hot topic of KDP suspensions for copyright infringement.
Case in point: I have an author-publisher friend who had a book on Amazon since the CreateSpace days without incident. For years, this book had been in publication, and the author owned the copyright. Several months ago, the author received an email from KDP saying that the book included copyright or trademark infringement and that their entire account would be suspended. For a publisher, this is a major problem.
At this year's London Book Fair, Wiley released detailed guidelines on how authors can responsibly and effectively use artificial intelligence tools in their writing.
"Writers and researchers are already using AI tools, whether publishers like it or not," said Jay Flynn, Wiley EVP and general manager for research and learning, in a statement. "At Wiley, we'd rather embrace this shift than fight it. Our recent study shows these technologies will be everywhere within two years, and we want our authors to use them confidently while adhering to the strictest standards of quality and ethics. That's why we've created straightforward guidelines that cut through the hype and help people do their best work while using these new tools."
Examining the opportunities and challenges for retailers
Since the development of Generative Artificial Intelligence, there has been considerable discussion of its application to the book trade. But this has focused on specific aspects of the trade, particularly the experience of authors and publishers. There has been less focus on the impact of AI on the reader, and even less on how AI will affect retailers, the critical link between publishers and consumers. Like other parts of the value chain, AI will present bookshops with new opportunities and challenges, and booksellers who make the right choices will enjoy an advantage over less nimble peers.
Indie authors may think that an effective publicity campaign is out of their reach. Think again.
I have been working as a book publicist for 20 years. Starting out at a small independent publisher, I then moved to Hachette, and for the past decade I've worked as a freelancer. In that time, books coverage in the media has changed irrevocably.
The big-name authors and celebrity writers, who top the bestseller lists throughout the year, must now contend with smaller review space and reduced books coverage generally. Paywalls block reader access to interviews and features across national newspapers and digital magazines. Editors crave sensationalist content and clickbait headlines. Meanwhile, authors are encouraged to perpetually create content to share across their social media platforms. Devising and executing a successful book publicity campaign has never been more challenging. But what about self-published authors? They must face all of these challenges, but without a dedicated in-house publicist offering their support, time, knowledge and expertise.
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